Tyson Ibele releases tyFlow for 3ds Max in free open beta

Originally posted on 8 January 2019. Scroll down for news of the open beta.

Animator and game developer Tyson Ibele has released a new demo of tyFlow, his next-gen replacement for 3ds Max’s Particle Flow particle system, showing the new granular solver.

The solver is “fully integrated” with tyFlow’s global constraint solver, so granular fluids can interact with soft bodies and cloth, and supports GPU acceleration via OpenCL.

According to Ibele’s Instagram post, it can “easily handle a huge number of particles”: the demo above – which, rather spookily, shows an animated character drowning in sand – features 8 million of them.

So what is tyFlow, anyway?
First announced last year, tyFlow is a “complete rewrite” of Particle Flow, intended as a next-generation replacement for 3ds Max’s native particle and physics systems.

Ibele describes the toolset as “what PFlow could have been, if development didn’t stop like 10 years ago”.

As well as making it possible to recreate entirely new types of materials, tyFlow adds simulation retiming and support for Phoenix FD and Krakatoa’s native file formats.

It’s also intended to improve simulation performance, introducing full CPU multi-threading, GPU instancing in the viewport and “super fast” auto-caching.